OnApp adds NSX support to its VMware portal, simplifies network orchestration with VMware vCenter and vCloud Director

OnApp announced support for VMware's software-defined networking technology, NSX, in the new version of the OnApp cloud management portal. OnApp is a complete cloud management platform for service providers and enterprises. 

For clouds based on VMware vCenter and vCloud Director, OnApp makes cloud management easier and more efficient by automating cloud orchestration, provisioning, templates and packages, user management and metering in one intuitive portal. 

Now OnApp is bringing the same benefits to NSX, to make it easier for VMware cloud operators to combine flexible software-defined networking with their cloud services in the same intuitive user interface.

"We're delighted to bring greater value to our VMWare partnership by unifying the networking power of NSX, the enterprise platforms of vCD and vCenter, and OnApp's rich cloud orchestration and billing functionality," said Tim Meredith, OnApp's Chief Commercial Officer. "Bringing all this together in a single GUI and API makes life easier for VMware cloud operators, and for their customers and users."

OnApp will initially allow VMware cloud operators to manage firewall, NAT, load balancer and VPN services from the OnApp portal, for both vCenter and vCloud Director compute resources. 

It also supplements NSX functionality with the ability to use IP helpers and wizards to allow cloud operators to configure rules and services from within the same interface, instead of having to switch back and forth to retrieve all of the information needed. 

OnApp will initially support VMware NSX-V. Future versions of OnApp will introduce support for the next generation of NSX, NSX-T, in the same user interface and with the same orchestration, pricing and packaging functionality offered by the OnApp portal This will help smooth the transition from NSX-V to NSX-T for VMware cloud operators.

Pavilion secures VMware Ready status for its Hyperparallel flash array offering; boosts data management features

Pavilion Data Systems announced Monday release 2.3 of its Hyperparallel Flash Array with VMware Ready status. The no-compromise enterprise storage platform now supports a complete suite of data management features for consolidation of VM sprawl and native Container Storage Interface (CSI) for simplified migration to PKS, Docker and Kubernetes containers. 

Release 2.3 includes native VMware support for vCenter, VMware Ready support for NFS along with backward compatibility for block-based iSCSI connectivity. Release 2.3 has been beta tested with numerous customers worldwide and is currently available.

The system is capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of Virtual Machines across 72 standard NVMe SSDs with capacities reaching 1+ PB using 16 TB NVMe drives. All of the Pavilion data management functions, including snapshots, thin provisioning, encryption and RAID-6 volume provisioning are now enabled under VMware vCenter for simplicity of scaling and consolidating enterprise VM sprawl.

One of the customers for Pavilion’s VMware consolidation is the Netherlands Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). CBS selected Pavilion over several traditional all-flash arrays based on performance and footprint manageability. 

Last month, Pavilion Data Systems announced record-breaking results of STAC-M3 benchmarks in a new Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) Report.

The STAC-M3 benchmark specifications are maintained by the STAC Benchmark Council, which consists of more than 300 financial institutions and more than 50 vendor organizations. User firms include the largest global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and other market participants. 

Such firms designed the STAC-M3 benchmark suite to represent a common set of performance-related challenges in financial time-series analytics. The STAC-M3 results were audited by the STAC, which facilitates the Council.

A solution using the Pavilion Data Hyperparallel Flash Array populated with standard SSDs for the test produced world-record performance in four analytical benchmarks against all other publicly disclosed systems, including systems with direct-attached storage and Intel Optane drives. The Pavilion array came ahead of all other publicly disclosed solutions involving kdb+ and flash arrays in eight tick analytics benchmarks.

“Release 2.3 extends Pavilion’s leadership from webscale and HPC customers directly into the heart of the Fortune 100 where VMware is the predominant operating environment,” said Gurpreet Singh, Pavilion CEO. “By natively supporting VMware NFS, demonstrating the upcoming VMware-native NVMe-oF functionality and enabling all of our data management functions inside vCenter, we enable orders of magnitude more consolidation than the nearest competitor and simplify operations in a familiar way for VMware administrators.”

Pavilion Data announced in August that its Series C funding of US$25 million, bringing the total funding to $58 million. New investors are Taiwania Capital and RPS Ventures.

All existing investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Korea Investment Partners, DAG Ventures, Artiman Ventures, SK Telecom, and Tyche Partners participated in this round. The investment will accelerate the delivery of the company's NVMe-oF products, expanding to new markets, and growing the team to support customer demand.